Passing Arguments by Position and by Name (Visual Basic)

When you call a Sub or Function procedure, you can pass arguments by position — in the order in which they appear in the procedure's definition — or you can pass them by name, without regard to position.

When you pass an argument by name, you specify the argument's declared name followed by a colon and an equal sign (:=), followed by the argument value. You can supply named arguments in any order.

Passing arguments by name is especially useful when you call a procedure that has more than one optional argument. If you supply arguments by name, you do not have to use consecutive commas to denote missing positional arguments. Passing arguments by name also makes it easier to keep track of which arguments you are passing and which ones you are omitting.

You cannot pass arguments by name to avoid entering required arguments. You can omit only the optional arguments.

You cannot pass a parameter array by name. This is because when you call the procedure, you supply an indefinite number of comma-separated arguments for the parameter array, and the compiler cannot associate more than one argument with a single name.